Grants go to city museum, Sealaska internship

The Alaska State Museum announced $105,600 in grants to institutions throughout the state Thursday, including a grant for the Juneau-Douglas City Museum and a smaller grant for Sealaska Heritage Institute.

The two Juneau grant money beneficiaries received a combined $10,049, amounting to just over 9.5 percent of the total amount awarded between the State Museum’s 23 grants.

Grant money for the Juneau-Douglas City Museum, a total of $8,049, was directed toward the organization of the museum’s education collection. The education collection is the museum’s trove of artifacts often used for hands-on learning, sometimes in conjunction with local schools.

Jane Lindsey, director of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum, said the grant would help the museum purchase containers in which to store education collection items.

“The building is very small, so as our permanent collection grows, we have had to move items off-site,” Lindsey said.

Lindsey said the process of reorganizing the collection is doubling as a sort of inventory for the museum.

“We’re looking at our education objects that we have in entirety, culling them, housing them in better storage locations and also making sure we know what we have,” said Lindsey.

Among the items the museum needs are metal cabinets, archival storage boxes and a flat file holder, Lindsey said.

While the Juneau-Douglas City Museum uses its grant money for the education collection project, Sealaska Heritage Institute received $2,000 for an internship program.

Rosita Worl, executive director of Sealaska Heritage Institute, said the internship in question is for

a woman pursuing a graduate degree in archival science. Sealaska Heritage Institute, she said, is working with the University of Alaska Southeast to improve its growing archives of Native history in the region.

Worl said she is pleased by the grant award.

“Even though it’s small, it is important to us,” Worl said. “And why it’s important is because right now we’re finding, you know, that the federal government is really reducing the number of grants that they are providing. And so we’ve had to change our strategy … (and) look at lots of different sources.”